Initial Work with the Family

Abstract

Most people working with families regularly now agree that certain sorts of beginning are more productive than others. Within the creation of a temporary security made by the social worker sitting down with a family, there are processes that help the family to work on their own anxiety, that enable them to begin to define in more conscious ways why they think they have come or have sought outside intervention (or face the reality of why it has been imposed upon them by law), and that are more likely to help them begin to do some work on this between them. Families themselves are as likely to see no point in their coming as to be well motivated, and may very well be violently opposed to being involved. The social worker therefore needs to have some conviction about what is being done, and needs a good ‘selling line’ to convey the integrity of his or her purpose, either by letter or word of mouth, to the group he or she is hoping to see. In this country, a greater proportion of social workers see families for first interviews than continue to work with them as a group (Gorell Barnes, 1980) since nearly all family work takes place in agencies that believe in offering a variety of professional interventions to the families they see.